Lynne Kiesling At Reason Brian Doherty reports on home gardeners in Oakland being fined for zoning violations when they sell produce, and their being required to spend a lot of money to acquire commercial permits. Bob Dylan, prophet for his generation: even your home garden absolutely is against the law–at least if you dare let …
Law Does Not Evolve Apace with Economic Dynamism Read More »
Lynne Kiesling Live! Here! Now! The annual Kauffman Foundation Econ Bloggers Forum is being webcast today, until 11:30 CDT and then again 1:00-4:00 CDT. A lineup of great speakers; I was unable to attend last year, but greatly enjoyed the event two years ago. I think Bryan Caplan is about to speak … I will …
Lynne Kiesling I am intrigued by the conversation in which John Whitehead is participating that takes on the question in the title to this post (and I’m very grateful for his saying that I’m one of his favorite bloggers, thank you!!!). Background: Matthew Kahn looks at REPEC data to see that in economists ranked in …
Lynne Kiesling Increasingly I agree with Deirdre McCloskey that over the past 120 or so years economics has moved further away from incorporation of the importance of the Bourgeois Virtues into our analyses of economic decision-making and economic growth. Indeed, I claim that ignoring the effects of virtue on individual decision-making is one of the …
Lynne Kiesling When I think about climate, greenhouse gases, carbon policy etc., I always worry about the certainty that people (typically politicians) want to attach to models (actually, that statement holds for macroeconomic models too, for the same reasons). The global climate is an incredibly complex system, comprising many individual agents and local systems that …
Lynne Kiesling I am listening to an NPR story right now on the conflicts over the construction of the new pipeline to bring Canadian heavy crude oil from the tar sands to the US. Steve Inskeep introduced the story by observing that as Canadian tar sands production increases, US consumers will “become more dependent on …
Lynne Kiesling Alex Tabarrok made some comments on the proposed ATT/T-Mobile merger that reflect my own thinking on the subject: a la Williamson, the benefits of the cost savings from the merger may well exceed the reduction in consumer surplus from any price increase arising from going from 4 national competitors to 3. Alex also …
Lynne Kiesling For your weekend intellectual stimulation and viewing pleasure … I cannot recommend this highly enough: Deirdre McCloskey’s recent talk at George Mason University about her new self-recommending book Bourgeois Dignity, the second in what’s likely to be a 4-volume re-examination of Western economic history. I guarantee you will learn more, and think more, …
Lynne Kiesling As a celebration of impending spring, I give you economics journalist Olaf Storbeck’s sound analysis of the economics of bike lanes. His prompt for writing was a rant from John Cassidy in the New Yorker about the tradeoff between bike lanes and “free” street parking spaces. Storbeck’s analysis is thorough, and goes beyond …
Lynne Kiesling Will Wilkinson is sick of talking about the broken windows fallacy (as are we all …), and has instead written a very nice overview of the academic literature on the economics of disasters. He gives some good pointers to articles to read, and points out that we simply don’t know the likely economic …
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